NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center here is expanding the scope of its nuclear technology work to encompass the Obama administration’s shift away from the canceled Constellation back-to-the-Moon effort toward a more open-ended technology development portfolio.
During the Constellation years, Marshall worked with the Department of Energy on nuclear-power technology that might one day power a lunar outpost. While Los Alamos and other national labs handled the radioactive material, NASA experts here used heating elements to simulate nuclear fuel and concentrated on the power systems that would generate electricity on the Moon.
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